Dances with Werewolves
by Dead Pan Contest
Summary: This is my entry to the Deadpan Contest. Sookie takes a post on the Western frontier and becomes acquainted with the mysterious supe world.


**The Dead Pan Contest**

**Title: Dances with Werewolves**

**Story/movie parodied: Dances with Wolves**

**Characters: Sookie and Eric**

**Disclaimer: Charlaine Harris owns the SVM characters. Somebody else owns Dances with Wolves.**

**Summary: **This is my entry to the Deadpan Contest. Sookie takes a post on the Western frontier and becomes acquainted with the mysterious supe world.

* * *

After proving myself in battle, the Union army gave me my choice of posts. I had fought in many battles in the War Between the States in spite of the fact that I'm a woman. By that point in the war, they were desperate for bodies and had adopted a don't-ask-don't-tell policy when it came to gender. I just tucked my long blonde locks up into my cap and tried to keep my voice as low as possible. The day I stole an officer's horse and rode a suicide mission into a skirmish, I was seriously injured, but the general who commanded our unit was so impressed with my courage that he held my hand as I lay recovering on a little cot and said, "Son, you may keep that horse and that injured leg and have any post you want as a reward for your service. Oh, and nice tits, by the way."

I had seen enough of war and wanted to travel to the frontier. I requested a post in the West where it was rumored that uncivilized tribes of supernatural beings (called supes in folklore) made it impossibly dangerous for humans to settle the land. What the army didn't know about me was that I had a secret touch of supe in me. Ever since I was a little girl, I could read people's thoughts, but I always kept it to myself so I wouldn't be considered crazy. I wondered whether I might fit right in with the odd creatures that inhabited the plains of the West and looked forward to my new adventure.

I reported to the officer in charge of sending people out to the frontier. He seemed as mad as a hatter and announced that he'd "pissed in his pants" while giving me my orders. As I rode away from his office building, I heard him shoot himself in the head and made a mental note to keep it to myself if I became incontinent. Apparently, that was seriously frowned upon out here in the West.

A very foul man with a team of mules and a jar of boiled eggs drove me out to my post and dropped me off. I suspected I'd never see him again since he was so vile, he'd most likely be hated by supes. He probably got a few arrows shot into him on his way home just for being so unappealing. I'd considered shooting him myself, but I'm not a savage.

I got the abandoned fort cleaned up and livable. It was a mystery where the people had gone who'd once inhabited the fort, but I tried to not dwell on the obvious spookiness of the situation and just focus on my chores. I did some deep cleaning and tossed a few throw pillows about to give it a homey touch.

I tried to stay busy and kept a journal of my activities. I started noticing that a lone wolf with white socks would come by the fort every full moon and I would try and tempt him with a slab of bacon, but he didn't want to get too close. Fortunately, when he wasn't a wolf, he was a very handsome and charming guy named Alcide Herveaux who liked to hang around and teach me ballroom dancing. We became pretty good friends and he taught me a lot about the supes in the area.

I knew there were vampires nearby and once in awhile a trio of teenage vampires would come by and try to steal my horse, but amazingly, the horse always outsmarted the vampires and got away from them. I decided that a target was a poor example of a human and made a vow to meet the supes head on. Meanwhile, I had pretty much mastered the rumba, the mambo and the cha cha.

Alcide and I were working on the foxtrot one night when I noticed a handful of vampires watching me from a ridge across the plains. They were all very handsome and intimidating-looking, but I was determined to make friends. They watched from a distance like that until Alcide and I had perfected most of the popular couples dances and had started to work on inventing line dancing. We thought it would be more fun if we had enough people to actually form a line and so we invited the vampires to join us.

I was amazed to learn that I couldn't read the minds of the vampires and thought I sure would like to hang out with them so I wouldn't have to listen to so much crap all the time. I could hear Alcide, but it was kind of muffled since he was a Were. But the silence of the vampire minds was even better. The vampires spoke a native tongue that I couldn't understand but I found intriguing. I started inviting them over on the nights that Alcide was busy chasing other were animals and opened a vein, serving a little blood to each of them in tin coffee cups. We seemed to have a fairly good rapport, but the language barrier was frustrating. I was able to understand that they were concerned that they hadn't seen any herds of fairies around lately, and asked if I had. Apparently, that's what they relied on mostly for sustenance. I was trying to explain through the use of finger puppets and hand shadows that I hadn't seen any, until finally one of them suggested I come to their camp to meet an interpreter.

I followed them back over the plains and entered a tee pee made of fairy hides and there in front of the fire sat the handsomest vampire I'd ever seen. He was tall and blond with the most perfectly chiseled features and piercing blue eyes. I couldn't help but notice he was sitting cross-legged and stole a tiny peak under his little flap of fairy skin that served as the vampires' ridiculous excuse for clothing. He was just as perfect under that little square of fabric as he was everywhere else. He spoke to me in English, but with an odd accent. Apparently, he was a thousand years old which gave him plenty of time to become the tribe linguist. I was so relieved to be able to communicate and interrupted him to ask him the most obviously burning question: was he straight?

His English name was Eric but the tribe called him Stands with a Fist up his Ass because he was so stubborn and high-handed. He told me that they all called me Dances with Werewolves. I tried to explain that I really had only danced with the one so technically it shouldn't be plural, and stressed that we were nothing more than dance partners, but he said that that really was irrelevant. He told me the names of my new vampire friends that I'd been enjoying line dancing with after they sipped on cups of my blood. The one that I thought seemed to be of some importance was Sucking Neck and the really, really handsome one that I thought was so brave (and I had thought of as "the fierce one") was Breaking Wind in his Hair. Now that we were all able to communicate using Eric as our interpreter, I could finally warn them that humans were moving out West in droves and it was only a matter of time before the tribes of vampires were in danger of being displaced. In turn, they told me that they could kill entire villages of humans with one hand tied behind their back, to which I just replied, "Never mind."

I started hanging out at the vampires' camp all the time. They were so much more entertaining than Alcide because we could dance as a large group. Plus they didn't eat all my bacon every full moon. Sometimes we'd play musical chairs around the campfire and if I lost, I had to let one of them bite me. It was some special fun, although they did often cheat with that vampire speed thing and sometimes I got a little light-headed from the blood loss. But it was all worth it to have some new friends.

On the nights I was back at my own lonely camp, I longed for my new companions and sometimes danced alone around the fire, imitating their wild native gyrations. I was always a pretty decent dancer and thought that if they ever made my story into a movie that this image would make for a great little piece of film for the trailer so I practiced until I was really, really good at it.

One night the vamp camp was attacked by a ragtag tribe of assorted supes—mostly weres and a shifter or two. I rode like the wind back to the soldier fort and retrieved all my guns and took them back to the camp, thinking that each vampire would have the might of two with such weapons. But by the time I got back, all the vampires were sitting around all "pinked up" from feeding, picking their teeth with plastic toothpicks (they hated the wooden ones). Eric took one look at me with my stash of guns and said, "That's real sweet of you, Dances, but you know we have fangs, right?"

The more I was around Eric, the more I enjoyed peeking underneath that little flap of fairy hide. When nobody was looking, we'd often sneak behind a tree and make out. I'd give him a little sip of my blood and he'd let me "adjust" his fairy flap. Finally, we couldn't stand the secrecy anymore and asked Sucking Neck for permission to marry. He thought it was a little odd, but could clearly see that we were in love, and so he said yes. I donned a full fairy-skin wedding dress and then Eric had fun trying to remove it later when we rented out the honeymoon tee pee.

I moved to the vamp camp full-time and began to be accepted by the tribe. I could "hear" the advancing herds of fairies with my telepathy, making it easier for the vampires to slaughter them for food and cute new outfits. No part of the fairy went to waste. I was praised during one particular fairy chase when I shot and killed a really fat fairy that was about to land on the leader of the teenage gang who had tried to steal my horse. (Turns out his name was Shows Fang a Lot.) Because I saved the life of a young warrior vampire, I became a respected guest member of the tribe.

We all lived that way in peace and harmony, as happy as could be until the day we decided to move the camp to the winter campgrounds. I ran back to the soldier fort to retrieve my journal and human supplies and was ambushed by a bunch of soldiers. They accused me of having "gone vamp," and I could hear in their thoughts that they intended to hang me for treason and use the pages of my journal for toilet paper.

There was nothing I could do but accept my fate. As we headed back to civilization, I watched in horror as the soldiers took pot shots at a lone Alcide doing an interpretive modern dance on the ridge of the prairie. They were cruel and had no respect for nature or the art of the dance. They taunted me and tried to steal my necklace of fairy teeth and kept me chained to the wagon as we began our journey back to a world I no longer cared to know. I was upset, but felt pretty sure that as soon as the sun went down, they were going to get their soldier asses kicked by my new vampire family. Sure enough, as we began to cross the river at dusk, I watched as my brothers and sisters of the night swooped in and took care of business. Breaking Wind in his Hair let me dramatically strangle one of the soldiers who had been particularly nasty to me (and was illiterate to boot!) with the manacles I was bound with. That felt pretty good and sealed my fate as a murderer, helping me to fit right in with the vamps.

I was taken by my friends to the winter camp where most of the vamps had settled, and Eric came running out of a tee pee and tackled me to the ground kissing me. I asked him why he hadn't come to my rescue himself, but he was tied up with the big move and couldn't make it. I forgave him and dragged him back into the tee pee to get me warmed up by the fire through the use of well-placed friction.

We spent much of the winter in camp, but before the thaw of spring, I knew I'd have to return to the East and face the human population. I tried to explain to my friends that among the humans, I was hated like no other. I hoped by educating the humans about the supes, that somehow, I could bring the two worlds closer together. And if not, then Eric could just kill them for me. He was really handy in that way.

As Eric and I were leaving camp on our horse, I saw the sadness in the faces of my vampire family. Sucking Neck gave me an affectionate little nibble on my collarbone and Breaking Wind in his Hair rode up on top of a rock and shouted out across the camp at the top of his lungs, "Dances with Werewolves is my friend!" And then he lived up to his name and created another loud noise to let us all know what he thought of my departure.

Eric and I mounted our horse and began to ride East. I was so sad to leave our family and thought of all the vampires in future generations telling tales about Stands with a Fist up his Ass and Dances with Werewolves who set out to face the human world to try and bring peace between the humans and the supes. I wondered whether we could ever be successful as long as there was hatred and prejudice in the world. Eric pointed out that we may be on a mission that could never be accomplished and wouldn't our time together be better spent making our tee pee rock like there's no tomorrow. It didn't take much to convince me and pretty soon we turned our horse around and went back to camp.

The vamps welcomed us back with open arms once we explained that we didn't really see the point in going back to the human world. Everybody pretty much agreed, so we celebrated our return by lighting a big fire and rolling out the fairy skin dance floor. Pretty soon Alcide showed up with some of his Were buddies and I lived up to my name organizing the first hoedown between vampires and Weres. Maybe I couldn't repair relations between the supes and the humans, but gosh darn it, there was no reason I couldn't bring all the supes together to enjoy a happily ever after. So, that's just what I did with Eric by my side. It was only the first of many nights I looked forward to in my new life as Dances with Werewolves.


End file.
